…and barely let him get a word in edge-wise. You have to admit that this is quite a feat.

This happened last week, when I was a guest on Mark’s show Connecting The Dots. It’s 45 minutes of me rambling on about Why I Am Catholic, how my conversion happened, and why Truth brought me home, and keeps me here. It all started when Mark mistakenly called me an Ex-Marine.

“In Him was life: and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it…He was in the world: and the world was made by Him: and the world knew Him not.” [Read more...]

It is ironic to run a post with a title claiming that one of the reasons Why I Am Catholic is to leave history behind. Especially when I have written in the past that one of the main reasons why I am Catholic today is because of Church history. Let me explain this paradox. [Read more...]

As you may know, today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. I found a pretty good short piece on the finding of the Holy Cross over at Magnificat. But as usual, I went looking for more. Whoa…Mr. Spielberg? I’ve found material for your next project. This would make an epic screen play! Take a look.

The title of this post says it all. Why bother becoming a Christian unless you believe this? “God became human to save us all.” And if you do believe it, why not practice the ancient faith of the earliest Christians? The one that, despite criticisms attempting to prove the opposite, hasdeveloped since Christ ascended to heaven, and yet has not done so at the expense of Biblical (and doctrinal) truth.

This post is not an attempt to explain all of that. That is what this blog, and a lifetime of study, prayer, and reflection, is for. Today though, just for a few minutes, pause from all the crises and craziness of your daily life to ponder the fact that God became a human being. [Read more...]

This is part VII of my conversion story, tagged as 2BFrank in the Tag Cloud. I run it every year on this day to commemorate the death of Thomas Merton, who was also known as Father Louis.

Yes, I am well aware that he is not a canonized saint, but the salient point about Fr. Louis’ life is not whether he was a good Catholic, or a bad Catholic. The main thing isn’t even that his writings helped bring me into the Church. [Read more...]

Given that Alfred Hitchcocks’ life has been in the news of late, what with the film Hitchcock hitting the theaters, I was happy to learn that he returned to the Catholic faith of his youth (if he strayed), and died in the resting arms of the Church.

Originally posted on June 6, 2011, it took a while but it recently became worthy of an update.

There will be no music post this morning folks, because music was presented here yesterday. Instead, I’m just going to share the map above which shows color-coded tracks of the missionary journeys of St. Paul. As the title to the post suggests, none of this was taught to me while I was in RCIA. I suspect that this is because it is more important to hear the Good News, than it is to learn New Testament geography. [Read more...]

There has been a lot of fur flying around lately regarding prodigal groups (possibly) coming back into the fold, while others get a solid scolding, etc. Since the season of Advent, Catholics have endured changes to the Liturgy and a new version of the Missal, and we’ve had to relearn lines we had memorized since forever. And lately the HHS Mandate has been seen as a galvanizing moment by many, me among them, and only as a distraction by others. In the immortal words of Rodney King, “can’t we all just get along?” [Read more...]